How Can Anyone Trust This Crew With Anything?

Frank Bruni: Bret, our unctuous and unctuously coiffed defense secretary just strutted over to Congress and requested something like five gazillion dollars so that we can win a war that President Trump repeatedly assured us we’d already won. Please tell me that even a hawk like you doesn’t want to give Pete Hegseth that kind of blank check.

Bret Stephens: First of all, I love the word unctuous; it reminds me of Mr. Collins in “Pride and Prejudice.” When it comes to Hegseth, other words that come to mind are oleaginous, turgescent, bombastic and insufferable. Second, in terms of funding, I’d give him even more than he asked for.

Frank: You must be kidding. You’re setting up a punchline, right? Hit me with it.

Bret: Totally serious. The Iran war has exposed serious shortages in our weapon stockpiles, especially the kinds of precision munitions like Tomahawk cruise missiles and Patriot interceptor missiles that we will need in large quantities in the event of a war over Taiwan or some other emergency. This should actually be a bipartisan issue: Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, has also warned about these kinds of critical shortages. And we also need to invest in critical infrastructure that can protect our troops in the age of cheap drones. The Times published an alarming and highly detailed editorial series in December making these very points.

Frank: One big problem with your position is that it doesn’t take into account which government officials are getting this titanic pile of money and whether they can be trusted with it. Members of the Trump administration can’t. We’ve seen that, on the military front, in ways both specific and general. Specific: Many experts believe that those “Trump class” warships that he demanded are as much about his ego as about the nature of future warfare. General: We’re locked in this Iran debacle not because of our arsenal but because of our asinine leaders, whose planning was so amateurish — so frat-house — that it didn’t even take into account the possible closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah, let’s shower these incompetents with tens of billions more.

Bret: The problem you’re putting your finger on is real: How can anyone trust this crew with anything? Except that investments in military spending are long-term and future presidents will have to rely on some of the decisions of this one to defend us and our allies at some later date. For instance, I don’t think it should be controversial, in the era of Russian or Iranian ballistic missile salvos, for the U.S. to invest heavily in ballistic missile defense, or in fielding unmanned weapons at scale, or in replacing our aging fleet of B-52 and B-1 bombers with the stealthy B-21 that is already in test flights. Leaving the Trump battleships aside, which will almost certainly never be built, the public needs to understand that military affairs are undergoing a revolution and we need to master it.

As for Iran, I’m hoping Trump destroys Iran’s one remaining undamaged nuclear site and, in defense of international law, forces Iran to open the strait. I’m less worried about his hawkishness than I am about his TACO tendency.

Frank: Your hope, when it comes to Trump and Iran, is impressively and poignantly durable.

Bret: You’re being very polite in not calling me certifiably deluded.

Frank: My mother raised me right. And I know, from having broken bread with your charming mother, that she did the same with you.

Let’s pivot from all this weapons talk. How is it that we have limitless resources for a disastrously executed military engagement and such finite amounts for other matters of public safety? It will be a while before we have full clarity on whether and how this cyclospora outbreak could have been prevented, but there’s no doubt that Trump’s cuts — and such madness as putting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of Americans’ physical well-being — are already seriously hurting Americans while leaving us vulnerable to more and worse. This administration doesn’t care much for inspections and medical expertise. Mustn’t coddle the elites and mustn’t get in the way of corporate profit. Is an America made great again one in which we interrupt our watching of bombs fall with trips back and forth to the toilet? More munitions, more adult diapers: the Trump legacy, at least metaphorically.

Bret: I think that what you are saying is a bit of a myth. We were spending close to 5 percent of our gross domestic product on defense in 2010, when Barack Obama was president. Last year we spent just over 3 percent. That’s historically low. Most of the federal budget goes to programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and debt service, not defense. And in terms of cyclospora, aside from giving me a new word for everything that comes out of JD Vance’s mouth, I think it’s sorta unfair to blame any official, even Bobby Kennedy Jr., for the kind of outbreak that could happen in virtually any administration, Republican or Democratic.

Frank: I’m so glad you brought up Vance, It gives us a point of agreement, which I shall turn into a point of tension in just a bit. But first: Thank you for your recent column about him, in which you wrote: “The prospect of this callow and sinister opportunist taking the place of the erratic buffoon now governing us may be the single scariest thought in world politics today.” I could hug you. I could kiss you. I’ll chastely stop there.

Bret: Let me go on the record right here: Even as I would gladly vote for Marco Rubio over nearly any Democrat, I will vote for any Democrat in 2028 over Vance.

Frank: Uh-oh. There goes the promised point of tension. I was planning — given all the chatter about her lately — to ask you if you’d vote for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Vance?

Bret: Yes. At least she’s evolving in a mildly saner direction. And she’s probably now found Taiwan on the map.

Frank: Gavin Newsom? You’ve lavished many withering paragraphs on him.

Bret: Gulping hard, but yes. Newsom is bottomlessly vain, frequently wrong and slicker than an oil spill: in other words, a typical politician who, to his credit, sometimes learns from his mistakes. Vance is purely opportunistic and infinitely malleable, a Looney Tunes conspiracy theorist who gives me the creeps.

Frank: Bernie Sanders, running on a ticket with Abdul El-Sayed?

Bret: Can you suggest another veep? But as far as Bernie is concerned, a spell of socialism, straight up no chaser, would have the silver lining of giving future generations permanent intellectual immunity against that temptation.

Frank: I find Vance fascinating. That’s not a compliment. Trump comes by his awfulness honestly, organically; he really can’t be anything other than his congenitally wretched self. Vance is all oxymoronically cloddish guile. It’s so telling that this second memoir of his, “Communion,” styles him as deeply religious. As a man of scruples. I call that camouflage. I file it under the doth-protest-too-much principle, though maybe it’s actual self-delusion. Thoughts?

Bret: Years ago, a friend of mine from high school began taking his Catholicism seriously; it made him a kinder, humbler, more self-aware and consistently decent person. Vance’s conversion seems to have accomplished the exact opposite. His model for a pope isn’t Leo XIV but Pius XII. He’s all Borgia, zero Wojtyla. He is using his conversion as a springboard to power, not as a shield against power’s temptations.

Frank: It offends me deeply when Vance or anyone else does that — and many, many people do that. It’s such an injustice to those among us, like your high-school friend, who are genuinely faithful and well-intentioned. I don’t want to feel cynical about religion. The Christopher Hitchens camp never appealed to me. It doesn’t adequately take into account how much good happens because of the do-gooders’ spiritual prompts.

Bret: Agree. Isaiah Berlin was right when he said that “dry atheists seem to me blind and deaf to some forms of profound human experience.”

Frank: But there’s a big chunk of the MAGAverse for whom the pantomime of religion permits as many of the seven deadly sins as they wish to rack up. (And they’re racking like crazy these days, with greed and gluttony getting especially vigorous workouts.) Mouth enough dogma, sprinkle your conversation with enough references to Christ, maybe drape a cross around your neck and all manner of cruelty and corruption is forgiven. Seems to be Hegseth’s calculation.

Bret: That’s been an issue with Republicans for a long time, and with any political movement that sets itself up as the camp of virtue: They oppose all vices except the ones to which they happen to be drawn. In fact, if there’s one saving grace to Trump, it’s that he never really presented himself as anyone’s idea of a saint. And he tore the mask off some of the hypocritical primness that used to define the party. Notice that I’m saying something modestly nice about Trump, who, as you rightly noted, has an ineradicable authenticity that Vance can never have.

Frank: Even Trump and Vance can’t ruin many of this country’s greatest sources of pleasure and pride. Like … ranch dressing!

There was much written during the World Cup about foreign visitors’ infatuation with various quirks of American cuisine and culture, and in The Wall Street Journal, Ben Cohen noted their affinity for ranch dressing, which coincided with the Hidden Valley Ranch brand’s efforts to expand ranch’s reach. Here’s a paragraph on that, referring to Nick Higgins, the brand’s general manager:

Inside the Hidden Valley headquarters in Oakland, Calif., Higgins and his colleagues study all kinds of food and ask themselves a simple question: Will it ranch? The answer is yes. Of course it will ranch. Veggies, salads, pizza, wings, fries, caviar, pickles, cottage cheese, ice cream — they’re all eminently ranchable. And now that anything can be ranched, everything is getting ranched.

That’s American ingenuity, Bret!

Bret: And one more Journal story of note: As the tournament drew to a close, the paper’s Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg reported on another way visitors fell for the States, no matter their feelings about our politics:

They fell in love with the hash browns at Waffle House. They discovered the brisket sandwich of Buc-ee’s. They lamented the lack of public transportation options, then marveled at Waymo. All of it was eye-opening. The scale of our shopping malls, the size of our highways and the cornucopia that is the Costco frozen-food aisle.

Always nice to be reminded — Vance et al to the dismaying contrary notwithstanding — that there’s really something precious to this land of ours.

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